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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

SANA'A, 29 April 2014 (IRIN) - The 2011 street revolts that drove Yemeni
President Ali Abdullah Saleh from office and spurred an
internationally-monitored democratic political transition were
considered a boon for anti-corruption activists, who had spent the past
decade trying to foster good governance reforms in a prevailing system
of graft to little effect.

But more than two years into the process and despite the impetus given
to the new democratization era by interim President Abd Rabu Mansur
Hadi, the anti-corruption agenda is still grappling with a culture of
impunity in which people are reluctant to blow the whistle out of fear
of losing their jobs, donor funding or worse.

The founder of a local human rights foundation, who requested anonymity,
said Saleh’s overthrow dismantled one patronage system only to create a
plethora of opportunities for new actors to exploit, increasing the
competition.

“Under Saleh, bribery was more standardized - there was a limit to how
much a soldier would demand,” he told IRIN. “Now, with no central
authority, each group has its own price.”

But for Mohammed Al Basha, spokesperson for the Yemeni embassy in
Washington, D.C., this is par for the course. The high levels of
corruption Yemen is experiencing "are characteristic of transition
periods where you’re going to have people take advantage of the chaotic
atmosphere to benefit.”

In 2013, Yemen earned its lowest Corruption Perception Index score in the 11 years that Transparency International (TI) has been using the measurement, falling just 10 slots from the bottom.

In a 2013 Yemen Polling Centre survey, 42 percent of respondents said they felt corruption had got worse since 2011.

While respondents said they felt an even bigger decline in jobs, the
economy and public services, corruption was a bigger concern to them
than the security situation, human rights, women’s rights and the
political situation.

“It’s not my job”

An international medical professional who works with trauma victims in a
government-run facility in Sana’a told IRIN of daily graft by a fellow
aid worker in collusion with the Yemeni military official who runs the
facility. It included extracting money from an aid agency’s budget by
inflating certain costs or charging for items never purchased.

Due to the risks involved, however, the medical worker decided to ignore the problem.

“It’s not my job. I’m here to support my patients,” he said on condition
of anonymity, adding that exposing the corruption could scare away
donors, compromise the entire project and ultimately affect the
patients.

Yemeni colleagues at the facility expressed doubts that blowing the
whistle would accomplish anything, given the legacy of impunity military
commanders continue to enjoy, despite slow-moving efforts to bring the
military-security apparatus under civilian authority. The Yemeni medical
staff told IRIN they feared not only that the military commander would
escape punishment, but they would lose their jobs and perhaps face more
serious consequences for challenging the commander’s authority.

Such dilemmas are not uncommon in Yemen’s politically sensitive
environments in which both aid agencies and donors face pressure to
uphold a positive image in the eyes of government officials and the
public in general.

“Donors and implementing agencies are generally not keen on denouncing corruption,” Transparency International wrote in its 2005 Global Corruption Report.
“They often fear a possible backlash in domestic public opinion that
could undermine future support, the risk of local political instability
or retribution from local authorities which may lead to the end of
programmes benefiting vulnerable populations. Exposing corruption may
also lead to a loss of credibility and reputation when direct
mismanagement is involved.”

Anti-corruption risks

Beyond the policy concerns are very real concerns for the safety of whistleblowers.

As part of a new campaign called “Keep your income clean”, TI’s local
chapter, the Yemeni Team for Transparency and Integrity (YTTI), spread
awareness about security sector corruption by speaking to locals about
their experiences with bribery and extortion involving policemen and
soldiers. One day during the campaign last autumn, policemen allegedly
threatened YTTI members physically: One officer aimed his rifle at the
volunteers, while his colleagues pushed around the activists and shouted
at them as they protested in the streets of the capital, TI said at the time.

Earlier last year, in May, an unidentified gunman reportedly shot the
group’s project coordinator after he delivered a public speech against
corruption, injuring him seriously.

The absence of state whistleblower protection laws has further
compounded the risks of exposing corruption. According to the US
Department of State’s 2013 Human Rights report
on Yemen, “NGOs reported many cases of individuals losing their jobs or
suffering other harm after revealing instances of corruption.”

The report also stated that Yemen’s “Ministry of Social and Labor
Affairs interfered with the licensing of some human rights-related
organizations that were viewed with suspicion, including organizations
focused on accountability and transitional justice. Civil society
organizations and NGOs not focused on these issues experienced minimal
restrictions on their activities.”

Impact of corruption on aid

For one tribal sheikh from Marib Province, east of Sana’a, the nepotism
endemic in aid projects run by government ministries often counteracts
the intended benefits.

He heads the local office of Dar Al Salam, a tribal conflict resolution
and humanitarian aid organization, and would welcome the construction of
a new hospital in his district, where there is only one hospital with a
few doctors who can do minor operations.

But “staff are mostly hired on the basis of their relations to the local
prominent sheikh, who allocates jobs as he pleases, without regard for
qualified individuals who wish to apply to the positions,” he told IRIN.
“Many of the employees either do not exist or do not show up to work.
The latter collect their pay cheques without earning them, while the
sheikh collects the pay cheques of the former ‘ghost workers’. By the
time each employee takes his share of the budget provided by the
Ministry of Health, there’s hardly anything left to buy medicine or
maintain the facility.”

More than half of Yemen’s population - or 14.7 million people - are in
need of some form of humanitarian assistance. Millions of people do not
know where their next meal is coming from; more than one million
children under five are acutely malnourished, and some 13 million
Yemenis do not have access to an improved water source or adequate
sanitation. Another 8 million do not have access to health care.

Yet of the $706 million requested to respond to humanitarian needs in
2013, UN agencies and NGO partners received just over half that amount.

Yemen’s reputation for corruption is one of the driving factors limiting aid funding.

Before a major donor conference in 2006, Yemen received
only US$13 per capita per year in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA)
compared to an average of $33 for other Least Developed Countries
(LDCs).

As recently as 2013, Chatham House described Yemen as a “donor orphan”,
saying the ODA it received was still “a fraction of that sent to three
other similarly poor and high-risk conflict-affected countries, namely
Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Challenges of reform

In 2012, the Friends of Yemen grouping of international actors seeking a
stable political transition in Yemen pledged $7.9 billion in mostly
humanitarian and development aid. But Yemen’s history of mismanagement
of foreign aid and limited capacity to absorb large amounts of funding
have slowed its disbursement.

In 2006, a forerunner to the Friends of Yemen in London pledged $4.7
billion in aid for Yemen, only about 10 percent of which had been
disbursed by 2010 due to absorption and corruption obstacles.

These factors led donors to bypass the regular Yemeni system altogether
this time around, creating instead parallel institutions capable of
absorbing the $7.9 billion in a more transparent, effective and timely
manner.

But this approach highlights the challenges of fighting corruption in a place like Yemen.

Bypassing domestic institutions today defers capacity-building exercises
essential for the bodies to one day perform their intended functions
independently.

A 2013 report
by Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule
of Law concluded that one of the main problems affecting the
disbursement of aid pledges was the creation of “parallel institutions
as a mechanism to channel aid in Yemen, without addressing the real
absorptive capacity constraints needed by the government in order to
maximize aid effectiveness and promote better governance mechanisms in
the country.”

Still, Yemen’s current absorptive and disbursement capacities can
contribute to significant delays in delivering pledged resources to
crisis situations - leaving donors in something of a Catch-22.

“Not only can such delays affect the security and well-being of targeted
communities, they can also induce local authorities and businesses to
find inappropriate ‘quick fixes’ and turn to corruption or the informal
or criminal economy,” TI wrote in its report.

A 2011 study
by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) aimed at
reducing corruption in the delivery of aid found that current
anti-corruption approaches are usually unsuccessful because they rely
too much on internationally-driven “technical-legal” processes that lack
widespread local consent. “No country can change without domestic
collective action” and the role of the international community should be
to support the representativeness and sustainability of those
initiatives, it said.

In addition, “Most of the current anti-corruption strategies… focus on
increasing legal constraints, which often fail because most
interventions are localized in societies that lack the rule of law,”
NORAD wrote.

In a line: There is no ‘one-size fits all’ approach, the report said:
Each society has its own dynamic that is best tackled indigenously
through a customized strategy.

In the context of Yemen’s failing economy - oil revenues have been falling sharply
- bribes are likely to continue to be a necessary adaptation to bleak
economic conditions until the government is able to tend to policemen
and other rank-and-file civil servants whose salaries barely meet
subsistence levels.

“Petty corruption ensures the survival of low-ranking civil servants,
even if some of their bureaucratic activities are in themselves
questionable,” argues Philippe Le Billon, associate professor at the
University of British Columbia, in Canada.

Progress on the horizon?

Still, some see progress on the horizon.

The UN Secretary-General’s special adviser on Yemen, Jamal Benomar, says
he is optimistic about the prospects for the anti-corruption agenda.

After 10 months of reconciliation talks that wrapped up in January,
delegates at the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) “recognized that the
country’s resources were pillaged by a handful of people and that’s why
they came up with a number of conclusions that constitute a programme
of recovery of these assets,” he told IRIN. “One of conclusions of the
NDC is the setting up of a national committee to oversee implementation
of these goals in practical terms… So no doubt with the end of the NDC
there will be a focus on this set of issues related to corruption and
asset recovery.”

The Good Governance Working Group
responsible for developing a new framework to eradicate corruption
recommended the establishment of whistleblower protection through the
“issuance of a law to protect informants, witnesses and investigators in
corruption cases.” A loftier goal aimed to eliminate the chief cause of
petty graft or bribery through legal “reform of the wage and bonus
structures for the State and private sector employees with the objective
of improving their living standards and the meet [sic] the level of
sufficiency to eliminate corruption.”

Implementation of these anti-corruption measures, of course, will be the
challenging part. Al Basha, the Yemeni government spokesperson, said
this is an increasing priority for the government.

In 2013, President Hadi fired and replaced many high-ranking officials
that were involved in corruption; and the Central Organization for
Control and Auditing (COCA) has prosecuted junior to mid-level officials
and recovered money, he said.

“But overall everyone has been [so] obsessed with the security and
political aspects that the economic and financial sectors have been -
not neglected - but have been a second priority. But that will change
this year.”

He said an asset recovery law in second draft at the Legal Affairs
Ministry would assist the push for financial reform when approved.

Other mechanisms already exist, but suffer from a lack of effectiveness and transparency.

The independent Supreme National Authority for Combating Corruption
(SNACC), for example, made up of government, civil society, and private
sector representatives, was formed in 2007 to receive complaints and
develop programmes to raise awareness about corruption.

In 2013, 100 corruption cases were referred to the Authority for prosecution, but by year end, no sentences had been pronounced.

A total of 25,621 public employee financial disclosure statements have
been filed with the SNACC, with 686 noncompliance cases submitted to the
Public Prosecutor’s Office for action,” the US State Department said in
its 2013 Human Rights Report. “These declarations were largely unavailable to the public.”

According
to the British ambassador to Yemen, Jane Marriot, the Mutual
Accountability Framework which Yemen and supporting governments signed
at the Riyadh Donor Conference in 2012 included the strengthening of
SNACC.

In the meantime, long-established forms of graft persist with impunity.

“At the moment, Sana’a can’t solve the sheikh corruption problem,” the
Marib tribal sheikh said. “Maybe in the future new leaders can be
installed - those who don’t play a role now. They can inspire people to
rebel against corrupt tribal leaders. But if the Yemeni government
sticks to the same leaders, the situation will remain as it is.”

NB: IRIN has concealed the identity of most of those quoted in this article out of fear for their safety.

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